Ok, so we've gotten a good start on multilib in portage over the past few months. amd64's 2005.0 has been great in some areas and terribly lacking in other areas. We've started seeing more design flaws, and I'm thinking of doing some revisions to the toolchain/profile logic which will allow for much better crossdev toolchain integration as well as phasing out the ABI variable.

ABI was introduced because CHOST was insufficient to ALWAYS determine the ABI being used... The main example for this is mips64-u-l-g. We have no way to distinguish between n32 or n64 with this ABI. Most other examples are a bit more obscure. For instance, we MAY want to make a.out binaries for i386-*.